You should not be in this sacred place of rest, reserved for honorable Nordic peoples, but you are. You should not loot the burial urns littering its halls, filled with gold, gems, and armor meant to ease the Nords’ journeys to the afterlife, but you likely will. By this same logic, you should not pick the barrow’s locks or traverse its traps—the express intent of which is to keep outsiders out—but you most certainly will. Thus, “no” in the burial tombs of Skyrim does not mean “no.” Rather, I argue that the “no” imparted by the game’s resistant landscapes fuels the fire of the player’s rapacious “yes.”

Critical gender analyses are never freed from the risk of inadvertently naturalizing the very systems they intend to critique. To focus on binary gender in Skyrim, for instance, comes at the expense of sufficient attention to its representation of nonbinary and other identity formations, including the all-important intersections of gender with race, class, and ability. However, I insist that value abounds in a critical analysis of Skyrim’s dominant gender representations, particularly its portrayal of femininity as a concept that exceeds the category of the human and guarantees bodily violation. 

As Alexander Galloway insists in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), those who play such video games as Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise are not merely passive consumers of media. Rather, they become “actors” who,

learn[], internaliz[e], and becom[e] intimate with a massive, multipart global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus, to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel ‘allegorithm’). […] In fact, in their very core, video games do nothing but present contemporary political realities in relatively unmediated form. They solve the problem of political control, not by sublimating it as does the cinema, but by making it coterminous with the entire game, and in this way video games achieve a unique type of political transparency.¹

By considering Skyrim as allegorithmic, or a political rather than neutral media object, I suggest that its players “learn, internalize, and become intimate with” the binary gender system while navigating its tombs and pursuing its quest objectives. Galloway’s method trains my gaze at the game’s subdermal gender structures, or the way(s) that binary gender undergirds not only its NPCs but its level design. Whereas Galloway tags global resource management games like Meier’s Civilization as media which “fetishize control,” I insist that Skyrim’s allegorithm similarly fetishizes, and implicitly genders, the act of discovery itself.²

In their relation of early modern European travel narratives to Nintendo games, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins define the former by their “time-honored representation of [early modern] English voyages [as] a confident, masculine ‘thrust outwards’ and expansion of, among other things, an enlightened English rule.”³ This same ethic, they suggest, drives players of games like Super Mario ever onward into “the frontier” of successive game environs:

“[W]hat never loses its interest [in these games] is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and making them your own playground. […] [An] increased understanding of the geography, biology, and physics of the different [game] worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the same spot and move further into the frontier.”⁴

At the heart of the “promise” that players will gain mastery over game environs, I argue that desire rhythmically pulses. In Skyrim, players’ increased ease of entry into hostile game environments, filled as they are with rewards (e.g. gold, armor, books, etc.), builds the anticipation of future such ease. Cyclically, ease begets action. To plunder a barrow or traverse an earthen cave, to extract their resources and quell the uprising of their opposing inhabitants, is to “play” at self-perpetuating colonialism. 

After fighting their way through the bowels of a tomb, players earn a reward that may initially appear a mundanity: the word “Cleared” permanently appends the location of the “dungeon” (i.e. the barrow, cave, ruin, etc.) on their map. However, this word signifies players’ domination over the environ, marking its transformation from an unknown space into one which has been seen, touched, “mapped,” and thus irrevocably “known.” To refer back to Ulfric’s gendered metaphor, “Cleared” signifies that the player has traversed once-virgin soil and made it theirs.

Returning to Ulfric Stormcloak’s relation of ore extraction to “the raping of Skyrim’s silver mines” (mentioned in part one of this two-part series), the age-old relation of nature and femininity underlies both his metaphor and, by extension, players’ journeys into subterranean space. In her expansive survey of feminine representations of the natural world, Carolyn Merchant explains that, as the West shifted into the Enlightenment era, dominant images of Earth concomitantly shifted from a “nurturing mother and womb of life into a source of secrets to be extracted for economic advance.”⁵ Even centuries prior to the Enlightenment (which spanned the late 17th through 18th centuries in Europe), the Roman poet Ovid charts a similar shift relative to man’s degradation from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. If Earth flourished with freely given abundance during the Golden Age, the Metamorphoses poet suggests, then the Iron Age conditions Earth as a victim of humanity’s rape:

men began to bound

With dowles and diches drawen in length the free and fertile ground,

Which was as common as the Ayre and light of Sunne before.

Not onely corne and other fruites, for sustnance and for store,

Were now exacted of the Earth: but eft they gan to digge,

And in the bowels of the ground unsaciably to rigge,

For Riches coucht and hidden deepe, in places nere to Hell,

The spurres and stirrers unto vice, and foes to doing well.

Then hurtfull yron came abrode, then came forth yellow golde,

More hurtfull than the yron farre, then came forth battle bolde,

That feightes with bothe, and shakes his sword in cruell bloudy hand.⁶

With “cruell,” “bloudy” hands, the poet explains that Iron-Age peoples exhibited an insatiability (“unsaciably”) while tearing into the “bowels” of “[t]he Earth their mother.”⁷ To return to the beginning of this essay, Onmund, it seems, would accord with the poet’s tangible disgust at Iron-Age peoples’ violent, forced entry into Earth’s bowels to extract her veiled “Riches.” Regardless of in-game counterpoints, Skyrim’s dominant script nevertheless trains players in the same sort of rapine practice decried in this centuries-old poem.

1. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 90-2. ︎
2. Ibid, 93. ︎
3. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” in CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Stephen Jones, (Sage Publications, 1995), 70. ︎
4. Ibid, 62-67 ︎
5. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (HarperOne 1990), 165. ︎
6.  Ovid, 43 B.C.–18 A.D. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Dry Books, 2000), 1.151-61. ︎
7. Ibid, 1.180 ︎

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When you compound Skyrim’s legacy with its massive playerbase, expansive mod capabilities, and capacious open-world format, you get an endlessly mediated game that defies oversimplification. However, this has not prevented analysis of the game’s gender politics, with online threads dating back to its release puzzling over Skyrim’s depiction of women. “Are women in [Skyrim] portrayed in a good light?” asks a GameFAQs user in 2012, to which another user answers, “Women in this game are just as dirty, violent, and nasty as the men.” Another user offers a similar, though relatively tempered response: 

“[I]t’s hard to say. I’m a guy[…] I find that most of the people in the game fall somewhere between ‘mediocre’ to ‘tool’, but there are about as many memorable women as men in my opinion. There are female jarls (rather like Skyrim’s dukes/duchesses), female housecarls, female mercenaries and high-ranking military women. There aren’t any instances in my own time with the game that struck me as sexist, just characters I liked and some I disliked.”¹

Though each user takes a different tack, their replies ultimately harmonize: in Skyrim, men and women are equal because they are equally represented.

This perspective, though not the only one, has been abundantly endorsed online. As in 2012, so in 2020: Aaron Hall’s blog post “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG” proclaims the game to be the “most feminist-friendly RPG [he’s] played”: “men and women in Skyrim have nearly no differing social expectations. They serve the same functions in society all up and down the hierarchical totem pole. For this reason, I think Skyrim might be the most feminist-friendly RPG I’ve played.” To back his claim, he lists the following observations about the game:

“1. Women often serve in prominent social positions

2. No sexualization

3. The main character can be a woman

4. No helpless damsels

5. There’s a goddess dedicated to women [“Granted,” Hall qualifies, “there are Nine Divines in the world of Skyrim and only three of them are goddesses”]”²

Hall may be right in asserting that Skyrim is the most “feminist-friendly RPG” that he has played. However, as with the GameFAQs users, Hall interprets Skyrim’s progressivism only in its representation of women. By “representation,” I think it fair to say that he and other forum posters mean “presence.” As one would be hard pressed to equate a literary character such as Aaron the Moor from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus with a breathing, enfleshed Black subject, one cannot collapse the presence of women on-screen into gender activism.

In her book Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (2000), Dympna Callaghan considers the (im)possibility of representing marginalized peoples on the English stage in the 1500s and 1600s. “[C]hange in representation alone,” she insists, “does not bring about political change.” Nor, she asserts elsewhere, is “representation” the same thing as “inclusion”: “presence alone cannot be equated with representation any more than representation can be equated with inclusion.”³ This assertion about early modern stagecraft resonates with the present discussion of Skyrim and its walking, talking NPCs who perform, among other identity categories, gender. 

To equate representation with something like activism is to have what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “faith in exposure,” or the belief that “mak[ing] something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction.” But what, she prods, “does a hermeneutics of […] exposure have to say to social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence?”⁴ Pointing to such examples as US Southern chain gangs, whose labor matters less than their scrutiny under the public gaze, Sedgwick easily problematizes the oversimple equation of representation, or visibility, with ethical inclusion. 

“What won’t feminists bitch about?” one Reddit user asks beneath a 2011 thread titled, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” “Women aren’t equal! Wahhhh!,’ they mime, “Women are too equal! Wahhh!”⁵ Skyrim may feature a comparable number of women and men. However, to claim in-game equality is to elide key features of its world, including the presence of sexual assault against women. I am always struck, for instance, by the flippant tone with which Sapphire, a female NPC, recounts her backstory of sexual violation:

“Oh, wait…it gets much better. How about the fact that our farm was attacked by bandits, and that they killed my entire family who didn’t even brandish a weapon against them. Here’s the best part. They took me as a prize, and violated me for a fortnight. Tossed me from bandit to bandit like…like…”⁶

Sapphire’s assault may be unspeakable, but it nevertheless shapes her as a character by facilitating her entry into the Thieves Guild, an in-game criminal faction. In other words, violence against women may not occur on screen, but it still permeates Skyrim. To sidestep this incident in favor of a “gender blind” reading of the game would be disingenuous. However, to overdetermine this narrative instance and decry utter gender inequity may be to go too far. What role does sexual assault play in determining Skyrim’s gender politics?

Although we never witness it first-hand, Skyrim’s men are not unschooled in the domination and violation of women. In a settlement called Whiterun, the first major city featured in the game’s main questline, a female NPC named Carlotta can be overheard despairing that “[l]ife’s hard enough with all these men propositioning me. But that bard is the worst.” After speaking with her, players can accept a quest to convince the bard, Mikael, to leave Carlotta alone. After urging Mikael in this regard, he stubbornly responds, “That fiery widow is mine. She just doesn’t know it yet.” While one can read Mikael’s lines as boyish and earnest, they take on a more sinister valence when considered alongside Sapphire’s account of gang rape. 

While celebrating a victory over his enemy, the Empire, the leader of the insurgent Stormcloaks, Ulfric, likewise demonstrates his familiarity with the logic of rape: “Now that the Empire has been driven from the Reach we can put a stop to the raping of her silver mines. That silver belongs in Skyrim.” “Rape,” in this instance, metaphorizes the extraction of natural resources as sexual assault, casting the Earth (i.e. “silver mines”) as a feminine victim of the Reach’s forced entry. Ulfric’s use of the word “rape” also signifies the theft of property, implying the existence of a gendered hierarchy where Hall (quoted above) otherwise sees none. “Rape” belies Ulfric’s belief that he is the capable patriarch charged with protecting the chastity of Skyrim’s vulnerable, feminine body. Skyrim’s silver belongs to him, so his extraction does not bear a rapine quality. The Reach, he reasons, does not own Skyrim, and their extraction is therefore a veritable act of assault. His metaphor thus bespeaks the unspoken: men and women are not equal in Skyrim.

“One thing I never understood,” begins the title of a Reddit thread, “‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” In their post, the author explains their confusion:

Olfina Gray-Mane, who lives in Whiterun, always says this to me every time I pass her. If you’re a male, she’ll say “What’s the matter? Can’t stand the sight of a strong Nord woman?” But why? Women have the same opportunities as men: there are several business owners right there in Whiterun alone, there are women in the prestigious Companions faction including the highly respected Aela the Huntress, and there are even female Jarls. Ahlam, Nazeem’s wife, says something similar: “Men are all alike, from Skyrim to Hammerfell. They care only for war and politics, and treat their women like cattle.” Again, that doesn’t make any sense seeing as how there are many women throughout Tamriel that are very much respected and even several examples of a man and a woman working together (Jarl Idrod Ravencrone and her husband and Steward Aslfur come to mind). These are the only two women that seem to complain about something that doesn’t appear to exist. Anyone else find this strange?⁷

Beneath the veneer of Skyrim’s equal representation of men and women lie the gender inequalities of a patriarchal (i.e. male-dominated) system. Stephanie Weaver catalogues such inequalities in a 2017 blog post called “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1”: bandits, when snuck upon, can be overheard bemoaning the suspected infidelity of women and illegitimacy of children, a serial killer in Windhelm exclusively targets women, and a necromancer named Arondil kidnaps and sexually enslaves local women who once rejected him, to list a few examples.⁸ Perhaps, as the cultural consensus about Game of Thrones goes, Skyrim’s developers sought to generate a brutal and, thus, realistic world by referring back to strains of gender inequity that players would find familiar. Regardless, it is not only inadequate to source political progressivism in mere representation, but Skyrimdoes show why Olfina Gray-Mane insists that being a woman in Skyrim is not easy.

1.  u/Charybdis, “Are women in this game portrayed in a good light?,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” GameFAQs, March 8, 2012. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/62183595. ︎
2. Aaron N. Hall, “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG,” The Aaron N. Hall Blog (blog), May 11, 2020, https://www.aaronnhall.com/2020/05/11/skyrim-the-feminist-friendly-rpg/. ︎
3. Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2000), 18, 9. ︎
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Reading in Fiction (Duke University Press, 1997), 139-40. ︎
5. u/Rachel_gmrgrl, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” r/gaming, Reddit, November 12, 2011, https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mag6e/women_in_skyrim_a_feminist_perspective/. Emphasis added. ︎
6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda Softworks, 2013. ︎
7. u/LaPhantomess, “One thing I never understood: ‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” r/skyrim, Reddit, October 1, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/3n6skq/one_thing_i_never_understood_its_not_easy_being_a/ ︎
8.  Stephanie Weaver, “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1,” Speculative Rhetoric (blog), July 29, 2017, https://speculativerhetoric.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/skyrim-the-unequal-application-of-bigotry-pt-1/. ︎

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This overlap of thematic and ludic genres creates a complication for the application of genre and adaptation studies to video games because questions of adaptation and iteration must also consider the impact of player input on the generic experience. In examining the centrality of player input on genre expression, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar 2018) serves as an example which seeks to adapt the Hollywood Western into the format of an open-world, third-person action game. The game’s generic alignment begins even before the world has loaded, with loading screens displaying daguerreotypes of animals, landscapes, and wooden buildings, calling attention to the environment which the player will inhabit as the play.

When the game finally loads, the screen usually shows the player’s avatar, outlaw protagonist Arthur Morgan, in a relaxed pose: crouching to observe a flower, looking at a distant mountain, observing a sunrise at the edge of a forest clearing, standing outside of a saloon, or other such calm poses. The game immediately calls attention to the character’s place in the Western landscape before handing the reigns over to the player. At this point, the game’s digital assets have loaded and the various programmed systems—meant to create the illusion of a living, breathing Western landscape replete with townspeople and wildlife—are fully functioning. If the player does not input commands to the controller, however, the game will continue to run its Western procedures, but doesn’t yet allow its systems to affect the character.

To illustrate: during one play session, I sat to observe what the game would do without a player. It was nighttime, and Arthur sat crouched observing a flower. In previous play sessions, my actions as Arthur caused him to incur a bounty; though I hadn’t interacted with the game yet, its world kept moving and eventually bounty hunters arrived to gun Arthur down and collect their reward. Three men on horseback arrived and began to open fire. The game’s logic is designed with the intention of creating dynamic Western moments which feel unscripted and natural. Ideally, such bounty hunters would catch the player unawares, recreating the thrill of suddenly having to deal with a gunfight against a Western backdrop. But, up until the point that the player makes their first controller input (for example, making Arthur walk forward) their avatar is invincible. As a result, the men proceeded to fire endless amounts of ammunition into Arthur’s person for twenty minutes as I watched and took screenshots to capture the passage of time. When the sun rose, I decided that enough time had passed, and as I pressed the left stick to begin walking, the game spurred Arthur to “life” and began to process the damage of each shot—the Western shootout finally bearing its intended weight and consequence with a player at the helm.

In the scene which I’ve described, a threshold between what the game is attempting to accomplish in its creation of a Western world and what it is actually able to accomplish without the player’s participation is revealed. While the systems and procedures of the game may call upon events, scenarios, and iconographies which invoke the Western genre and give the illusion of a self-sustaining Western simulation, there is a limit to the game’s expressive potential in the absence of the player’s actions and reactions within the generic Western setting and scenarios. As games scholar Clara Fernández-Vara states regarding the player’s performing role within games, “The game designer does not have direct control over the experience of the player, particularly because the game needs the input of the player to become a performance” (Fernández-Vara 6). Until the player is present to participate in the world, the systems of the game (in this case the dynamics which construct the Western iconography in Red Dead Redemption 2) have little payoff and don’t invoke the full implications of the actions and consequences associated with the game’s thematic genre. As such, the game’s themes and systems are unable to come to their full generic fruition.

            The player is not only necessary to the game’s generic functions, but also to the direction that the game’s generic expressions take. While some have called Red Dead Redemption 2 a gamification of the revisionist Western, the game employs generic elements of various Western subgenres including the frontier Western, the cowboy Western, the outlaw Western, etc. This is true not only in the game’s worldbuilding, but also in the variety of gameplay activities and opportunities afforded to the player within the open-world framework. Within this generically broad structure, the player is the able to choose what sets of iconographies they will be interacting with during their play session. Whether the player has bounties to capture, cards to play, cattle to herd, fish to catch, or a train to rob, they can decide at a moment’s notice what sub-genre of Western they will be performing through their interactions. As a result, the overall generic expression of the Western as gamified in Red Dead Redemption 2 is difficult to track as it oscillates, sometimes jarringly, between various generic modes as the players engages with, enacts, and performs different versions of the Western.

            To conclude, tracing the application of well-established genres into video games requires additional considerations beyond the adaptation of iconographies, tropes, and themes. As players are central to the performance and expression of genre in interactive play, one must examine how the game’s systems function to create generic meaning, what role the player fills in the enactment of those meanings, and how the player is able to ultimately shift and manipulate the intended generic expression through modes of play. If Red Dead Redemption 2 can teach us anything about studying genre in video games, it’s that genre can be difficult to wrangle.

Works Cited

Fernández-Vara, Clara. “Play’s the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance.” Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, 2009.

Red Dead Redemption 2. PS4 version, Rockstar Games, 2018.

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The boxed-in effect of The Ascent’s top-down third-person perspective produces a visual overabundance of information that makes the game’s world claustrophobic, whereas Cyberpunk 2077’s first-person perspective—despite giving players a lesser degree of visual omnipotence— grants them a greater sense of freedom. As an example: in The Ascent, players can often see behind walls and around corners due to the top-down POV, often spotting enemies and/or loot from positions that would not be visible to their avatar. On the other hand, Cyberpunk 2077 players’ inability to see behind walls or around corners constantly generates visual suggestions of opportunity.

The overabundant visuals common to cyberpunk urbanity thus become less claustrophobic, and more inviting—what’s behind a given wall is unknown, potentially (and often) a reward or something exciting for the player to do. The divergent ways these two games illustrate players’ affordances of geographic exploration within cyberpunk cities draw attention to the “possessive individualism that motivates the main characters in cyberpunk [fiction]” (Alphin 2). Caroline Alphin’s book on neoliberalism in cyberpunk complicates the anticapitalist cultural critiques cyberpunk media is often assumed to possess; Alphin identifies the genre, when framed as a mass-market product, as a “force behind the perpetuation of neoliberal governmentalities” (2). The Ascent and Cyberpunk 2077 situate their players within similar narrative frames: players start as ‘nobodies’ within an oppressive society, ultimately embarking upon an action adventure, battling the powers that be of the socioeconomic elite, and becoming powerful individuals themselves. Both games exude the duplicity Alphin observes of the genre: thematic anxieties of capitalist dystopia, explored by audiences through main characters who embody neoliberal individualism. Though from the same genre and featuring similar gameplay centered around action and shootouts, the two games’ different camera POVs produce virtual worlds of divergent meaning, angling players’ experience of the cyberpunk generic POV toward different ideological ends.

Regarding cyberpunk virtuality in particular, Alphin points out that “…the values and discourses that permeate the informationalized reality of cyberpunk understand ‘jacking-in,’ ‘plugging-in,’ or ‘being-in’ a digital reality as a choice, and therefore, as acting through a subject’s agency and freedom” (35). Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent’s narratives framing their avatars as a mercenaries for hire presents players with gameplay loops of exploration, shooting, and looting as their job; both games provide fantasies where labor is entertaining, and where players choose to confront challenges repeatedly just by choosing to continue playing. Arguing that “the forces of armored neoliberalism have already broken into this ludic refuge [of video games]” Games of Empire asserts that “Virtual games simulate [player] identities as citizen-soldiers, free-agent workers, cyborg adventurers . . . [gameplay] shapes subjects for militarized markets, and makes becoming a neoliberal subject fun” (Dyer-Witherford and de Peuter xxviii; xxix–xxx). Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent’s mercenary avatars exemplify the “citizen-soldier” quite pointedly, illustrating not only players’ immersion in the cyberpunk genre as an act of donning a generic POV that prioritizes neoliberal individualism in order to facilitate achieving what the game considers success or victory through acts of violent gameplay.

Importantly, camera POV always mediates the generic POV in visual media, situating the genre’s narrative and aesthetic conventions within the literal framing boundaries of moving images upon a screen. Perhaps the most telling example of camera function’s relationship to neoliberalism within Cyberpunk 2077 and The Ascent arises through players’ ability, or lack thereof, to look upward. Within reference to the decades of preceding top-down twin-stick-shooters and dungeon-crawlers, the fact that players of The Ascent cannot look up seems an insignificant byproduct of camera perspective. However, alongside the claustrophobic effect the top-down third-person POV lends the game, there takes hold with the avatar a sense of disempowerment in that they are always looked down upon. For The Ascent, in particular, this carries a touch of irony due to that progressing through the game, as the title suggests, entails players’ moving ever upward throughout a technologized and neon-saturated megacity. The avatar, however, always remains spatially below; and players themselves remain unable to see what they are headed to next (through their ascension) until they’re looking down upon that next space, having already arrived. In effect, players’ ascent in the game is a backwards walk up a long flight of stairs, where they control their avatar from afar on the floor below. The visual omnipotence of the top-down view of The Ascent’s world undercuts the sense of individually determined freedom that neoliberal impulses arise from. Players’ ability to see not only the direction that their avatar looks, but all around them, lends the top-down third-person POV a pervasive sense of restriction rather than encouraging sense of mobility. Players see all their surrounding possibilities simultaneously, and thus the limitations of possibility altogether.

Cyberpunk 2077’s first-person POV, however, exaggerates players’ sense of possibility to the extreme. The player/avatar’s ability to look upward, especially, lends a sense of exploratory possibility and aspiration to the game, the exact emotional potential that The Ascent’s top-down third-person POV impedes. Walking the streets of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City suggests possibility to the player from all directions. Exploring alleyways and building interiors often rewards the player with opportunities, currency, or loot, and the game geographically and architecturally emphasizes verticality. The spiraled ramps of parking garages, elevators of high-rise buildings, and multi-layered highways are but a few examples of Night City’s structures that prompt players to look upward toward and subsequently desire to explore. Notably, a sense of forwardness, in Cyberpunk 2077, arises simply from movement in the direction the player/avatar is looking. While a top-down third-person POV such as The Ascent’s defines players’ motion within the confines of the world, a first-person POV provides an intuitive sense of mobility through that world, facilitating players’ exploratory impulses rather than imposing limits upon them.

The fulfillment of exploratory impulses gives rise to ludic experiences of freedom. Given that an area in Cyberpunk 2077 is gated off and/or guarded, players can safely assume themselves able to devise a method of stealthy trespassing or forced entry via combat. Virtual renditions of such spatial restriction do not inherently invite invasion, but the suggestions of the first-person POV encourage players to disregard restriction. In an open world game, like Cyberpunk 2077, players do expect to be challenged, but ultimately for their choices to be facilitated by the game’s systems for the sake of their entertainment. While The Ascent remains an entertaining game, its top-down third-person POV frames the avatar as stuck within the center of players’ screens, minimizing their perceived agency. Though both games exude the neoliberal trappings of the cyberpunk genre and gaming medium overall, attention to highly specific features such as POV unveil the consequential ramifications that divergent forms of presentation have upon generic fictions with similar thematic and ideological roots.

Works Cited

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. New York, Routledge, 2021.

Ascent, The. Windows PC version, Neon Giant, 2021.

Cyberpunk 2077. Windows PC version, CD Projekt Red. 2020.

Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 2009.

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Perhaps it’s silly to expect a multi-billion dollar platform such as Fortnite to be capable of doing truly progressive work around Black social movement. Even so, I’m drawn to the centrality of the archive in this attempt to educate players on civil rights. March Through Time recognizes that archival images play a significant role in informing our relationship to the past, even if the way in which Fortnite integrates those images into its project falls short. This is not to say that there are only “appropriate” or “inappropriate” ways to engage the civil rights archive. I’m not attempting to delineate what counts as “misuse.” I simply want to ask: if we wish to educate by way of archival images, how should our experience of those images be curated? What visual and sonic arrangements invite viewers to ask new questions about the civil rights movement rather than restricting or delimiting our understanding of that history? What uses of the civil rights archive can aid viewers in comprehending the struggle of civil rights as ongoing rather than distant?

I believe that Rauol Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016) and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2014)are two documentary film texts that imbue the civil rights archive with an urgency that is lost in Fortnite’s March Through Time. Both films accomplish this urgent and active relationship to history through careful aesthetic and sonic curation.

Raoul Peck’s 2016 film, I Am Not Your Negro, is a documentary film based on James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript, Remember this House. The film’s essay style narration, performed by Samuel L. Jackson, recounts Baldwin’s relationship to assassinated Black movement leaders and friends, Medgar Evars, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King^[2]. One of the film’s biggest accomplishments is its vast collection of repurposed archival imagery. The footage and photographs included in the documentary not only originate from and depict events from the civil rights era, but this archive is also inclusive of Hollywood film footage, photographs of Black lives lost to police violence, Black Lives Matter protest footage, and dreamlike tracking shots through contemporary environments. In imagining what James Baldwin would write about his friends in this unfinished manuscript, the film very deliberately moves between past and present, drawing critical comparisons between the concerns of nearly 60 years ago and those of today.

In her own essay on the film, scholar and historian Ellen Scott writes that Peck “achieves a curatorial feat in his selection and pairing of images and Baldwin’s words.”^[3]I think one of the best demonstrations of Peck’s curatorial capacities happens in a sequence that tackles the effects of white violence and white supremacy. In this section of the film, we view stunning technicolor footage from the late 1950s. We view white people, armed with picket signs and baseball bats, passionately protesting integration. The white protestors angrily chant “We want King!” and this footage is intercut with rare, up-close technicolor footage of Martin Luther King Jr. ducking through an unruly crowd. Given that so much of the visual archive of civil rights imagery is rendered in black-and-white, this vibrant color footage of King instantly troubles our assumed relationship to the past with shocking immediacy. Peck reinforces this unsettling temporal experience by juxtaposing these vibrant, full color images with black-and-white footage from the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri. In this footage, state violence is on full display. Police officers move through the city streets in armored tanks, they carry military grade weapons, and assault unarmed protestors. The meaning of this curatorial choice is made known in the clip that follows from James Baldwin’s 1963 interview with Kenneth Clark. When Baldwin voices his terror of the “moral apathy” of the “vast, heedless, unthinking, cruel white majority,” viewers must reconcile the similarities between the technicolor footage of white protestors and the black-and-white footage of the Ferguson police. Not only does “white cruelty” remain consistent in the present, but it is also thoroughly integrated into the systems that proclaim to protect all of its citizens.

Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death is an experimental essay film that has been described as a visual “tapestry.” The film is interwoven with interviews featuring prominent Black studies scholars, images from the archive of slavery, photographs from the civil rights and Black power movements, renderings of deep space, and contemporary slow-motion footage of Black people simply living, walking, talking, and moving through their everyday lives. The film moves “across scale, from the minute to the cosmological, from the familial to the collective” with what Alessandra Raengo dubs a “aesthetic liquidity.”^[4] As such, the film is afforded a temporal liquidity: it traffics from past to present in a manner similar to Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, but does so at an even larger scale in the spirit of contemplating Blackness and its meanings in the afterlife of slavery.

Despite this larger conceptual scale, Jafa’s film begins as a “lyrical meditation” on the legacy of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech^[5]. This film takes on the legacy of King, not by memorializing him through images, but instead by prefacing the film with a central question: Has King’s dream been achieved in the present? The question remains throughout the film as an audible motif. Passages from the “I Have a Dream Speech” are interwoven into the film’s sonic layers. As interviewees such as Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and Fred Moten philosophize on the meanings of Blackness, King’s intentionally slowed voice echoes and resonates underneath the scholars’ voices, enhancing the “dreamlike” quality of the slow-moving tapestry of images that appear on the surface.

In her examination of Arthur Jafa’s visual aesthetics, Tina Campt suggests that Jafa’s use of slow-motion, or more precisely “still-moving-images,” are a Black visual aesthetic of refusal. According to Campt, Still-moving-images are “images that hover between still and moving images; animated still images, slowed or still images in motion or visual renderings that blur the distinctions between the multiple genres; images that require the labor of feeling with or through them.”^[6] In Dreams are Colder Than Death, Jafa’s still-moving-images of Black life “refuse” both stillness and movement in a way that insist on the presence and humanity of their subjects. The sonic incorporation of Martin Luther King’s speech similarly insists on its own presence as present,  refusing to be rendered “past.” In this film, the “I Have A Dream” speech acts not as a passive soundtrack for the film, but instead becomes an active catalyst for exploring questions about what Blackness means and does in the present.

Dreams are Colder than Death and I Am Not Your Negro are exemplars of active engagement with the civil rights archive, and in this post I’ve provided brief illustrations of how these films carefully curate archival footage, photographs, and audio in a manner that challenges the passive curation inside Fortnite’s March Through Time. It is not lost on me that Peck and Jafa’s films, two experimental documentaries, are the exact kind of media that we would expect to tackle history in ways that ask new questions rather than presume answers. However, in placing these texts in conversation with one another, what occurs to me is that Fortnite is the most accessible of the three. I Am Not Your Negro is available to view on streaming platforms such as Netflix and Kanopy by those who are able to pay the necessary fee, but Dreams are Colder than Death has not been distributed to any streaming services. Jafa’s film has been screened in very limited viewing contexts such as in film festivals or university talks. In contrast, Fortnite is free and available on several platforms. Despite the game’s seeming incompatibility with the subject matter, I don’t think that TIME Studios was entirely off the mark in their desire to collaborate with Epic Games given the company’s reach. If reworked and rethought, could Fortnite’s March Through Time provide an engagement with civil rights history that not only closes the distance, but could also reach a very large audience of active players ? Or, are mainstream texts inherently incapable of challenging our relationship to the history of social movement? While I’m not sure how to answer these questions, I do think that our evolving media landscape will continue to force filmmakers and archivists to weigh questions of access moving forward.

^[1]https://broadlytextual.com/2021/11/20/march-through-time-fortnites-passive-engagement-with-the-photographic-archive-of-civil-rights/

^[2] http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/synopsis

^[3] Ellen Scott, “‘Some One of Us Should Have Been There with Her’: Gender, Race, and Sexuality in I Am Not Your Negro and Contemporary Black Experimental Documentary,” Jaimie Bron and Kristen Fuhs. I Am Not Your Negro: A Docalogue. (New York, NY;: Routledge, 2021), p.39

^[4] Alessandra Raengo, “Close-Up: #BlackLivesMatter and Media: Dreams are Colder than Death and the Gathering of Black Sociality” Black Camera: An International Film Journal 8, no.2 (Spring 2017) p.120.

^[5] https://liquidblackness.com/arthur-jafa-dreams-are-colder-than-death

^[6] Tina Campt, “Black Visuality and the Practice of Refusal”, Women and Performance a Journal of Feminist Theory, p.80

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However, Fortnite’s March Through Time quickly became infamous not for its purported educational value, but instead for its “cringiness.”^[2] If you spent as much time as I did on the internet this summer, you may have encountered viral Tik Toks or Tweets capturing the event. You might have seen avatars resembling the likes of Rick Sanchez, Clark Kent, and Ariana Grande running around with picket signs. Perhaps you saw clips of these characters kneeling in reverence to Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln. You might have even laughed at screenshots of players discovering 3D models of segregated “white” and “colored” water fountains. Instead of players participating in March Through Time as a way to learn about the civil rights movement or to honor King, it became a way to participate in the absurdity created by what Twitter user Blessing Adeoye Jr. calls the project’s complete and total “tonal dissonance.”^[3]  

Having taken up playing Fortnite semi-regularly during COVID as a free and easy way to have fun with long-distance friends, I wanted to experience what I was seeing online first-hand. I was able to convince my close friend, Andrea, to explore March Through Time together and we found ourselves utterly baffled by the whole experience. Unsettled by our nervous laughter, we immediately took note of the project’s competing tones. We found that Fortnite’s cartoon style clashed with the setting of the National Mall as Adeoye Jr. describes. Moreover, we were somewhat perturbed by the knowledge that we, just over a year ago, had actively participated in the real-life Black Lives Matter protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd. This was a time in our lives that was fresh on our mind during our second COVID summer. Even if the purpose of the March Through Time was the furthest thing from a protest, something about having the option to virtually emote with protest signs which said nothing more than “DREAM” felt wrong. We felt as if the history of Black struggles for liberation were entirely reduced to a multiculturalist, post-racial rhetoric of “teamwork.”

For this reason, we mulled over the project’s educational value. Looking beyond the tonal dissonance that dominated the surface, what was the March Through Time intending to teach its players about the civil rights movement? In what ways was the project aiming to honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy? Or, as Leigh Raiford acknowledges of the present uses of civil rights images in her book Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: “We are invited, expected, even demanded to recount and memorialize. To remember. But what exactly are we being asked to remember? How are we being asked to remember? And to what end?”^[4]

For me, the failure of March Through Time arises not just from the project’s tonal dissonance, but more importantly from the way in which it firmly relegates the events of the civil rights movement to the past, refusing to acknowledge how the struggles which birthed the movement persist in the present. This becomes most evident to me in how the archive of civil rights photography is used within the project’s virtual landscape. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to claim that it fails to put the archive of civil rights photography to active use.

At the heart of March Through Time—located at the very center of the game’s re-creation of the National Mall—is a virtual museum space through which players can move freely, stopping to view what the exhibit claims are “pivotal images in the civil rights movement.” The exhibit consists entirely of black and white photographs, static and unmoving, displayed cleanly, grouped together on the museum’s walls in thin black frames. These images are large and illuminated, standing out as points of interest in the low-lit museum space. However, players are unable to truly interact with or even zoom into the photos. Players are simply invited to stand before them at a distance and, perhaps, with a kind of reverence as the audio of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech” acts as a soundtrack for the viewing. It must be noted that the images players are prompted to revere are given very little context. The only clues to their significance are provided by vague captions, such as “SEPARATE BUT UNEQUAL,” “BIRMINGHAM CAMPAIGN,” and “LUNCH COUNTER SIT-INS.” Consequently, the photographs are presumed to speak for themselves; they are emblematic of an already established, concluded history upon which players can only look “back.”

While a few figures in the photographs are recognizable, such as Rosa Parks’s mug shot in the collection of photos captioned “THE MONTGOMERY BUS BOYCOTT,” or a young Ruby Bridges in the photos captioned “THE DESEGREGATION OF PUBLIC SCHOOLS,” there are no names attributed to the faces in the photos. In fact, barely any faces can be made out at all because players are only able to stand at a distance from them. As a result, these images are relegated to a distant past in a manner that is incompatible with the player’s present. It is this distance from the images that troubles me more than the project’s competing tones. If the images are distant, then so too are the struggles of civil rights, which is proved untrue again and again by the persistence of voter suppression, state violence, mass incarceration, and all other systems which continue to uphold our country’s climate of anti-blackness. It is this ongoing history of struggles for Black liberation which Fortnite’s exhibit fails to acknowledge in their passive arrangement of civil rights photography.

Photography was of vital importance during the civil rights era and continues to be a key element of Black social movement in the U.S. In his 1964 book Why We Can’t Wait, Martin Luther King himself claims that the way the media captured the state’s brutal response to the Birmingham Campaign exposed the “truth” of Black people’s subordination. King writes that:

The brutality with which officials would have quelled the Black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught—as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught—in gigantic circling spotlights. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world.^[5]

Yet, scholar Martin Burger’s central contention is that the images of the movement that circulated in the media in the 1960s— such as those showing Black people getting beaten by police batons, hosed down, and attacked by police K9s— did not necessarily reveal “truth” to the public. Instead, these selected images portrayed Black people not as active fighters for their rights and liberties, but as passive victims to individual white violence. Examining the dominant newspapers and magazine publications in the 1960s such as The New York Times, Life Magazine, and even TIME, Berger finds that the way these images were cropped, arranged, and narrativized with captions participated in stripping Black photographic subjects of their agency. As a result, white people and the state could then be positioned as “benevolent bestowers” of civil rights, diminishing the severity of the state’s ongoing violence against Black people, and extremely limiting the demands Black activists could make in favor of their liberation.^[6]

Similarly, the passive affect of Fortnite’s March Through Time is a product of the exhibit’s curation. The exhibit’s arrangements – its choice to hold the photos at a distance, to use minimal captions, and to not give faces to names – reduces the photographs to “digital shadows of their former being, both materially and intellectually.” The exhibit fails to recognize the archive of civil rights photography as one that is “actively resourceful” as scholar Elizabeth Edwards might observe.^[7] These arrangements raise no new and interesting questions about our engagement with civil rights. Unfortunately, the way Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is employed as a soundtrack to this viewing simply reinforces its passivity; it assumes the dream has already been achieved. This is why Fortnite can so easily, without contention or contestation, distill the lessons of the civil rights movement into seven words: “We move forward when we work together.”^[8]

Does this then imply that digital games are themselves incapable of an active engagement with the civil rights archive? Is recognizing the “active potential” of civil rights imagery something impossible to do in the mainstream? I have to wonder if there are ways to engage the archive of civil rights in a digital game format in a manner that refuses to delimit the archive’s possibilities. There’s an irony in Fortnite’s passive engagement with these photographs given the active ontology of digital games— what Alexander Galloway claims to be an action-based medium.^[9] This is why I think there is still tremendous potential for games to reorient our understanding of this history. While I am unsure about what an active engagement with the Black archive of photography might look like inside digital games at the moment, at least I can be sure that it’s not going to happen inside Fortnite any time soon.

In my next blog post, I’d like to examine what I understand to be two active engagements with the archive of civil rights photography. These are visual and sonic engagements that ask questions, don’t assume knowledge, and seek to uncover the ways in which our understanding of the civil rights movement is already mediated. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (2016)and Arthur Jafa’s Dreams are Colder than Death (2013) are both films that are invested in the “active potential” of civil rights imagery. The way they position the civil rights archive with and against contemporary images imbues them with an urgency that is entirely lost inside Fortnite’s tribute to the March on Washington. These films don’t simply memorialize civil rights images, but make them usefulfor exploring pressing questions that concern us in the present day.

^[1] https://time.com/6092587/i-have-dream-speech-fortnite/

^[2] https://www.denofgeek.com/games/fortnite-martin-luther-king-jr-event-reactions-controversy-debate/

^[3] https://twitter.com/BlessingJr/status/1431004344988565506?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1431004344988565506%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.denofgeek.com%2Fgames%2Ffortnite-martin-luther-king-jr-event-reactions-controversy-debate%2F

^[4] Leigh Raiford, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), pp. 3-4.

^[5] Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can’t Wait, (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), p.30.

^[6] Martin A. Berger, Seeing through Race: A Reinterpretation of Civil Rights Photography. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), pp.6-7.

^[7] Elizabeth Edwards. “Photographs: Material Form and the Dynamic Archive.” p.53.

^[8] https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/celebrate-mlk-time-studios-presents-march-through-time-in-fortnite

^[9] Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p.3.

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While navigating Tsushima island, players occasionally come across serene vistas and are given the option to sit before them and compose a haiku. When players choose to do so, Jin sets his swords down before himself and kneels, observing the landscape. The screen then displays an idea for players to “reflect on”; this will serve as the guiding theme for the haiku. Players’ normal freedom of movement is restricted—in these moments of haiku composition, they control only the camera, observing elements of nature to glean inspiration. Adhering to the 5-7-5 syllable structure, the game presents players with three options for each of the poem’s three lines. So, players aren’t themselves writing the haiku as much as structuring it from predetermined phrases.

In the above example video, of the many possible combinations, I constructed this haiku based around the theme of “strength:”

The final defense
Death’s call is sharp and biting
I yearn for guidance

‘Jogaku Haiku,’ found in northern Kamiagata

At this point, I must address that Tsushima’s haiku aren’t great—but that doesn’t mean that they’re not meaningful. I recommend Ian Walker’s excellent interview^[3] with haiku expert Jim Kacian regarding Tsushima’s poetic shortcomings. Kacian points out that because Tsushima offers players variation, its haiku often come out discordant and unfocused, fulfilling the 5-7-5 structure and adhering to a given theme, but rarely if ever presenting haiku that are artful beyond “the most superficial and populist sense.” I think the haiku I put together above exemplifies this well enough: while there’s a sense of foreboding, the ties between the three lines seem tenuous. The blanks can more or less be filled in by the context of their being themed around strength, but none of these lines meaningfully or directly engage with one another—at least not with the degree of nuance and poetic prowess that a critic like Kacian would expect. But the meaning that I as a player (taking on the role of Jin Sakai) draw from the poem is contextualized by other elements of the game and its narrative.

The opportunity to craft this particular haiku does not appear until later in the game, when things are most dire: terrible betrayals and tragic murders have transpired. The player finds themselves geographically isolated as the war effort has driven them to the wintry north into territory overrun by Mongol forces, and Jin as a character has become psychologically distant from an uncle who, throughout much of the game, served as a mentor. While, in isolation, the above haiku isn’t much to speak of, each line reflects experiences that the player has through Jin as their avatar. From here on, I’ll be referencing my personal interpretations of the game’s story. While all players of Tsushima meet the same characters and fight the same battles, the ambiguity of the haiku will undoubtedly evoke different meanings for different players. So, the haiku’s first line, “The final defense” most obviously reminds me of the ongoing war, as in the moment I composed the haiku the game’s plot was building toward a final confrontation with its antagonist. The line “Death’s call is sharp and biting” evoked the wintry climate featured throughout this portion of the game, as well as the game’s heightened difficulty at this point, as the Mongol forces confront the player with greater numbers, more heavily armored and armed than ever before. And finally, “I yearn for guidance” refers to Jin’s sense of directionlessness after ideologically conflicting with his uncle about tactics and the defense of Tsushima island’s people—at this point in the game Jin and the player alike are unsure of if Tsushima island can, in fact, be successfully defended.

The video linked earlier shows the different choices that I could have made while constructing this haiku. For example, the first line could have read “Falling forever,” connoting a greater sense of hopelessness than my eventual choice of “The final defense” which, while still dire, makes successfully resisting the invasion sound more like a serious possibility. Likewise, the middle line could have been “The mind recalls the teachings.” That line may have better fit into the idea of Jin being distant from his familial mentor, flowing more effectively into the final line of “I yearn for guidance.” However, I preferred the middle line as “Death’s call is sharp and biting” because the roughness of the transition into “I yearn for guidance” reflects a greater sense of desperation. This way, instead of the haiku illustrating Jin’s conflict with his uncle, it focuses on the dangers of the war with the Mongols itself, concluding with an admission that Jin needs guidance in some form to navigate the war.

With all of that said, there remains one other essential contextualization of Tsushima’s haiku: spatiality. As a video game, Tsushima’s audience has an interesting relationship with space. Players aren’t reading descriptions of Japanese forests, or viewing carefully orchestrated cinematography that utilizes tree trunks to create a sense of depth—players are walking through the forest themselves, circling trees and seeing the grass rustle underfoot as they choose to steer off of the beaten path.

In their 2009 book The Spatial Turn, Barney Warf and Santa Arias compiled essays which explores a recent cross disciplinary shift within the humanities, a turning of attention to “a perspective in which space is every bit as important as time in the unfolding of human affairs, a view in which geography is not relegated to an afterthought of social relations, but is intimately involved in their construction.”^[4] The game mechanics behind Tsushima’s haiku participate in this reframing of human presence within the landscape. As I’ve described, players come across opportunities to compose haiku while roaming the island. In that alone, there resides an interesting association between the composition of poetry and moments of discovery. But, more important, during the process of choosing the poem’s three lines, the options are anchored to points of the landscape; the player chooses each line by turning the camera toward it, and by extension the object that backgrounds it. In the earlier video example, “The final defense” was situated upon a rock standing sturdily among ocean waves; “Death’s call is sharp and biting” was situated upon Jin’s swords; “I yearn for guidance was situated” upon a mountaintop temple. Alternative lines, such as “Falling forever” and “The mind recalls the teachings” were respectively situated among the stormy sky and Jin’s head. The example video’s fixation on Jin’s swords and body is actually an exception—most of the game’s haiku focus exclusively on natural environments. These moments where Jin, as a character, reflects upon his situation within the war, double as opportunities for the player to reflect upon their overall experience with the game. The primary way that this occurs is by foregrounding visual elements of the game that players often take for granted.

Ambushing Mongol forces in forests and riding on horseback from fortress to fortress across the land, players of Tsushima see thousands of trees. During the action, players’ eyes are constantly drawn to Jin’s body, his blades, and the Mongol bodies they battle against through Jin as their avatar. While the backdrops of Tsushima are consistently beautiful, they’re seldom the focus. During instances of haiku composition, however, the camera is displaced from Jin, focusing often on trees and waterfalls, spotlighting the exquisite visual detail modern video games are capable of. The game’s haiku not only reflect Jin and the players’ personal journey through the game’s spaces and narratives, but also draw close attention to elements of the landscape that generally go overlooked. Although Ghost of Tsushima’s poetry is not particularly artful in the conventional sense, it provides noteworthy moments of meditation to break up the action. Given the game’s popularity, it has surely introduced a new generation of players to the haiku as a poetic form.

For those interested, here’s a compilation of many other haiku found throughout the game:

^[1] https://gamerant.com/ghost-tsushima-6-5-million-sales-march-2021/

^[2] https://www.gameinformer.com/2021/03/05/ghost-of-tsushima-developers-named-official-tourism-ambassadors

^[3] https://www.kotaku.com.au/2020/07/i-asked-an-expert-to-read-my-ghost-of-tsushima-haiku-he-wasnt-impressed/amp/

^[4] Warf, Barney, and Santa Arias. The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Routledge, 2009, p. 1.

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Manson’s book was originally advertised as a kind of puzzle “contest” in which the first reader to find their way from room 1 to room 45 and back again in 16 steps (or less, if possible) would win $10,000 dollars. The puzzle was solved in 1987, but the book remains an interesting early entry into what fan-site Into the Abyss calls the “Immersive Puzzle” genre. Here I’ll be thinking a little more about how MAZE works as an immersive puzzle, but more specifically how it does that by existing as a book.

Each of the 45 rooms in MAZE consists of two pages across a single fold. On the right-hand page appears an illustration of the room replete with clues, as well as doorways to other rooms in the book. On the left-hand page appears text in which “The Guide” and your fellow travellers discuss their encounter in the room.

As Manson suggests in the “Directions” page at the beginning of the book:

There are any number of clues in the drawings and in the story to help you choose the right door in each room. Clues in a series of rooms may relate to each one another, and may indicate a path. Other clues may refer to a specific door in a single room.

Anything in this book might be a clue.

Not all clues are necessarily trustworthy.

This multiplicity of clues becomes quickly clear upon encounter with Room 1. It’s difficult to determine whether the numbers, the lighting, the symbols, or the words in the first room are meant to clue us in on which door to take. There’s no way to really know if the choices you make in MAZE are the correct ones. The only way to be sure of your path is to attend to both the pictures and the stories and cross-check the clues given. The correct door should be motioned towards through more than one set of clues.

Though you have to use them together to succeed, the texts and pictures of MAZE maintain a strange relationship throughout the book. We never see any of the characters who speak in the stories in the images themselves. We hear them talk amongst each other and purportedly share the same spaces as they do, but we are never able to visually engage with the characters of the text. Because the images never contain any referents (such as the characters) that would guide the image-text relationship temporally, this relationship is left ambiguous.

Since the text is given on the left-hand page of each fold, we are prompted to encounter it first; that’s how English-language readers expect to read a book. We read the story and then look at the picture of the room with the story in mind; but, as we have no temporal markers in the image which correlate to the text, we don’t know whether the picture exists before the contents of the story or after it.

This ambiguity poses a problem for the interpretation of certain rooms in the maze. In Room 26, for example, the story reads: “They objected to my tone, but it distracted them from the real clues … I quickly picked up the bell, ringing it loudly” — “they” being the maze-goers, and “I” being the actively misleading Guide. The savvy reader will pick up on the language of “tone” as hinting towards the significance of the bell. The bell in the picture points towards Room 30, but since we don’t know whether the story or picture takes place first, we don’t know whether this is the “real clue” the Guide picks up the bell in order to interrupt — or whether this bell positioning is a trap set by the Guide after they put the bell back down.

This temporal ambiguity is multiplied by what Into the Abyss calls the “Loop Rooms.” When I first encountered MAZE, I felt very skeptical at the warning on the back cover of the book that “one wrong turn and you may never escape” could ever possibly apply to a book. After all, I have the entire contents of the maze within my physical possession and there’s no real penalty to flipping through rooms at random. Unlike other interactive content (like a puzzle video game), it seemed that I didn’t actually have to solve the puzzles of the book to reach the end — so how could I actually get lost in the book? Manson’s “Loop Rooms” proved me wrong. Of the 45 rooms in the book, 19 are effectively set apart from the rest of the rooms, and, once you enter them, there’s no way to get outside of the 19 rooms. This means that, while you feel like you are making progress, you repeatedly encounter the same rooms, and thus the same stories and pictures, over and over again, until you acknowledgement some kind of vague defeat.

The looping in the pictures forms an interesting labyrinthine architecture. Sometimes you go up ladders to get to rooms and later down slides, in ways that appear coherent spatially but are not coherent in actuality. Meanwhile, the text forms an interesting kind of narrative hodgepodge as each story connects to the next via ellipses that both begin and end each story (except for the Prologue and Room 24). Upon first reading, the characterization of the Guide seems to build over time as you progress narratively through the labyrinth. But, once you enter the “Loop Rooms,” you are forced to encounter the same segments of narrative over and over again. Since MAZE is a book, neither the text nor the images ever change and this sameness is immediately coherent to the reader. MAZE rigidly denies the flippant reader access to the Path to Room 45, forcing a closer reading of its contents and an active deliberation of both text and image.

It is this reconsideration of text and image within the book format which I’ve continually pointed to in MAZE. Though the immersive puzzle book genre never really took off, MAZE’s ambiguous text-image relationship and active refusal of disengaged readership positions MAZE as both an important predecessor to immersive puzzle video games like Myst (1993) and The Witness (2016), and as something fundamentally different. MAZE takes advantage of a certain degree of medium specificity to position the book and its reader in a hermeneutic battle which, if not “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle” is at least “The World’s Most Challenging Puzzle Book.”

Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.

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The level layout alone gives us some insight into the effectiveness of the game’s opening. If you’ve never had the chance to play the game before, can you guess where Mario starts? Can you guess which direction he will be facing and where he’s supposed to go? After you have an idea, go ahead and watch the opening moment here (end at about 2:10).

By way of review, let’s break down how this reflects the aspects of interesting introductions I’ve discussed so far:

• An interesting introduction sounds good.

The sounds are really what make this opening moment so memorable to me. I’m not talking about the music either, although it is a fitting fanfare to bring players into this 3D world. The sounds that I remember most are actually the ones you hear after the music has ended: intermittent birdsong, the tap of Mario’s shoes, and the exuberant sounds as he leaps into the air. This gives the space and the characters in it another audio dimension to go along with the added spatial dimension, showcasing the power of the new hardware and the depth of this new world.

• An interesting introduction circumscribes, rather than describes, its subject.

The flythrough of the castle grounds could be considered a literal circumscription of the subject — we get to see the space which Mario will be exploring momentarily. But there is a second layer of circumscription in the use of the camera-wielding Lakitu. Lakitu is not the most iconic of Mario characters, usually coming up as an enemy in the later levels of the earlier games, so seeing him here (in what turns out to be a helpful role) may be a surprise for players. This not only builds up the suspense to see Mario in his polygonal glory, but allows players to see the space they will eventually begin exploring.

• An interesting introduction makes its audience start to think.

The flythrough does more than show off the castle — it gets players thinking about the possibilities of exploring a 3D space (which, again, was a novel concept in 1996). Lakitu’s flight under the castle’s drawbridge and over the green hills encourages players to think about how the space is connected and where they might traverse. Players with a keen eye might even notice an enticing secret: when Lakitu pulls back before going under the wooden bridge (at about 1:43 in the video), there is a door visible submerged beneath the castle’s moat.

The first time I noticed it, I immediately tried to swim down and check it out. Though it turns out to be nothing you can get to yet, its existence is enough to get players searching for secrets — a tactic the game rewards players for later.

• An interesting introduction recognizes its audience.

In general, games tend to address their audiences more directly than other media do, mainly by describing how the non-diegetic mechanics and systems work. Lakitu’s existence, however, takes this to another level. The audible click and perspective shift right before Mario comes out of the pipe establishes that the audience is viewing this world through a moveable virtual camera. As this was probably the first game with 3D graphics players would have experienced, and establishing this visual metaphor is crucial for the rest of gameplay. The connection to the “Lakitu Bros reporting live” bit is later made explicit in this introductory sequence in order to reinforce this point.

What is remarkable about this scene with Lakitu is how it represents one of the few non-optional tutorials players get in these opening moments. As soon as players are able to take control of Mario, they are presented with these directions:

Ciao! You’ve reached Princess Toadstool’s castle via a warp pipe. Using the controller is a piece of cake. Press A to jump and B to attack. Press B to read signs, too. Use the Control Stick in the center of the controller to move Mario around. Now, head for the castle.

In a mere 51 words, the game has told new players all they need to know about movement. The signs scattered around the castle and the game’s multiple levels give players more tips, but I don’t remember ever needing to read them in order to figure out the game. Pretty much everything you need to know is given here or via Lakitu’s talk about the camera (which occurs after you have a chance to mess around with the controls). This leads to the final takeaway of interesting introductions:

• An interesting introduction leans forward

Although players are free to explore Super Mario 64’s opening space, such a space is designed to push players forward. If the fact that Mario’s position at the bottom of a hill directly faces an enticing castle didn’t make it clear enough, the game tells the player three separate times (in Peach’s letter, the opening tutorial, and Lakitu’s discussion about camera movement) to go to the castle. No one stops to remind Mario if he’s fooling around for too long in the garden, but these original instructions do encourage forward movement. There are also more subtle techniques for this as well: players who fall into the moat soon discover that there is a slight current that leads them directly to a beach at the right of the screen, which is an easy walk back on land and towards the castle.

This is what I mean by leaning forward rather than forcing someone forward. Each of the introductions I have discussed so far — the descriptions of holes in The Hobbit, the slow zoom into a TV in Us, or Super Mario 64’s castle exterior — are wonderful places to linger, but are designed so that one doesn’t linger too long. After all, beginnings only function if they have a text that follows; otherwise, they’d just seem incomplete.

… and it is in that spirit that I really ought to get back to writing my dissertation. I hope that this look back on some of my favorite opening moments has been as fun for you reading it as it has been for me to write it! For now, it’s time to lean ever more forward and (hopefully) get a text worth a great introduction.

John Sanders is a PhD Candidate in the Syracuse University English Department where he studies film, new media, and adaptation. He is currently working on a dissertation about digital and analog games based on literary works, and hopes that no one recalls his library books.

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In this month’s posts on Metathesis, I have discussed the metaphorical uses of contagious disease and examined the figure of the zombie in some popular late twentieth and twenty-first-century texts. In my final post of the month, I would like to turn to a unique sub-genre of the zombie narrative that unsettles the survivor-centered perspective of zombie outbreaks: the eco- zombie.

Zombies present an interesting study in the metaphor of contagion because they embody contradictions and create questions that disturb our sense of self and communal identity. The most obvious of these contradictions, of course, is that zombies are the “living dead”: two oft-mutually exclusive terms in the human experience. One is generally alive or dead, but not both simultaneously. The biological science of how zombies actually work is often left somewhat fuzzy in zombie science-fiction, which tends to give more emphasis to the latter portion of the hyphenated genre, rather than the former. These complex biological questions are typically subsumed by the drama and urgency of the survival story. One stunning example of this is in the 2105 film World War Z, when the viewer is introduced to a brilliant young epidemiologist who only minutes later slips unceremoniously in the rain and accidentally blows his own head off.

In terms of popular story-telling, this emphasis makes sense: the redemption narrative of survivors makes for a more emotionally engaging and compelling drama with which readers, viewers, and players can identify. Part of the power of the survivor’s narrative is that we can imagine ourselves in their shoes. This perspective aligns with the zombie’s function to horrify and disgust the reader, viewer, or player in an act of dis-identification with the dead. In short, the horror of the zombie is centered upon the fact that nobody wants to become one! In fact, it is impossible to even imagine what it is like to be a zombie, given the way zombies embody a complete lack of supposedly distinct human capacities – including a sense of individuality, empathy, personality, and sociality. This narrative dynamic makes thinking outside of the standard human vs zombie conflict relationship difficult.

However, two recent zombie narratives have given us a new spin on the zombie narrative by taking inspiration from biology, and imagining the dead living in symbiosis with the natural world. In both The Last of Us (2013), a highly-cinematic survivor horror videogame from developer Naughty Dog, and The Girl With All the Gifts (2016), a novel and feature-length film developed from M.R. Carey’s short story “Iphigenia In Aulis,” a rampant fungal infection of Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis infests the human population. Known colloquially as the “Zombie Fungus,” Cordyceps is a true-to-life fungus that consumes and takes control over the bodies of ants and wasps. It manipulates genetically determined behavioral patterns of the ants it infects, compelling them to climb high above the forest floor, where they then clamp their jaws on a leaf, and remain as the fungus grotesquely protrudes from their body.

A “zombie ant” infested with Ophiocordyceps Unilateralis

Joel battles an “infected” human from The Last of Us

The Cordyceps-infected humans in these stories aren’t specifically identified as “zombies” in either text – they are referred to as the “infected” in The Last of Us and as “hungries” in Carey’s story and its film adaptation – but they can be easily identified as such by their appearance and behavior, especially their cannibalistic rage. Because the “zombie ants” that host the Cordyceps fungus in real life are, if anything, less violent than their healthy counterparts, the violence of the human Cordyceps victims in these texts can be interpreted as making reference to “genetically determined behavioral patterns” recognizable in the aggressive human species.

Melanie and a group of “hungries” in The Girl With all the Gifts

A very zombie-like “Infected” human from The Last of Us

In both texts, the symbiotic relationship between the infected humans and the Cordyceps fungus allows the infected to maintain a scientifically stable relationship to the natural world. This relationship is also markedly distinct from the fuzzy biological uncertainty of most zombie films. Cordyceps really exists, and it only takes a small logical leap to envision humans under the organism’s control. Rather than being presented as monstrous doubles of humanity, these versions of Cordyceps zombies represent an ecological and biological world which is rebounding against human civilization and industrialization. In both The Last of Us and the film adaptation of Carey’s story, visuals which depict the overgrowth of nature into formerly urban spaces play an important role in signifying how the viewer and player should interpret their monsters.

Overgrown London in The Girl With All the Gifts

Overgrown Salt Lake City in The Last of Us

The encroaching vegetation in these scenes infests the urban landscape and reclaims the landscape for nature, turning the city into a space both uncanny and sublime. The vegetation subsuming the metropolis transforms it into a dilapidated, ivy-embossed maze filled with ghostly relics. Similarly, the Cordyceps infection presents itself on the human body through grotesque, bubbly growths, signifying a biological excess overtaking both the human body and society. The overgrowth of nature on the infrastructure of the city and the Cordyceps fungus on the human body call attention to the material excesses of human cities and urban life. By reclaiming the city and the human body for the natural world, these infestation suggest that humanity has also overgrown, and as a result disrupted biological homeostasis and ecological balance.

Melanie and survivors navigate overgrown London in The Girl With All the Gifts

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Interestingly, in both The Last of Us and The Girl With All the Gifts, the Cordyceps infestation creates a scenario in which a young woman with a unique resistance to the infection presents an opportunity for a “cure.” However, in order to process the cure, she must be sacrificed. In both texts, characters must weigh the life of the innocent individual against eradication of the human species. In the dramatic conclusion of the narrative arc in The Last of Us, the player must decide if they will save Ellie, the young girl that they have spent hours of gameplay guiding and protecting through a maze of zombies, with the knowledge that her survival means the end of the world. In The Girl With All the Gifts, Melanie makes this choice herself, choosing to transform the whole world with Cordyceps and found a new zombie society based on the teachings of Miss Justinaeu, the only person who treated her sympathetically.

A doctor attempts to convince Joel (the player) to sacrifice Ellie for the greater good of mankind in The Last of Us

By using biological science to reimagine the biological impact of the fungus among us, these texts break the mold of the standard zombie narrative. The Last of Us and The Girl with All the Gifts imagine zombies through a perspective of biological symbiosis and ecological balance, rather than racialized contagion or scientific terrorism. In doing so, these texts reshape how the metaphor of the zombie can be interpreted in an age when an excess of humanity and human impact threatens to push the ecosystem out of balance.

Zombies are harbingers of an inverted natural order and the embodiment of the redistribution of power. While this disruption of the order of life and death is violently disturbing for survivors, there are signs in many zombie narratives that the collapse of human society might actually be to the benefit of nature and the organic world that zombies inhabit. If we begin to reimagine zombies not as a gross corruption of humanity, but as organisms that are a balancing force of an interconnected biological world moving towards homeostasis, we begin to get a different picture of zombies and their relation to the metaphor of contagion. Eventually, they come to represent not a teleological progression from life to death, but a seasonal, circular, progression reflecting a desire for environmental balance, and a commitment to imagining the world through the changes and returns of life and death on a larger and longer scale.

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